Sunday, August 22, 2010

Baby Quilt Part II

It's finished! This weekend has been full of creative happenings in our house, mostly involving ripping of lath and plaster from the walls in Thomas's room, and then gibbing it, but somewhere in between all the dust and mess and mayhem I managed to finish Flossy's quilt (Flossy being the name we've given to this bubs while in utero). Ever since I've been walking around like someone who won the lottery and keeps checking their ticket just to be sure - I keep taking a quick look at the quilt to make sure it's as lovely as I remember. And it is. Ok, so my quilting lines aren't perfectly straight and my stitch lengths are a bit all over the place (teething problems with my new walking foot I think), but I don't care. It is handmade afterall, and by definition that means it has to have a few little imperfections.

When it came to quilting, I was always going to do the diagonal lines across the squares like I've done, but I was hoping to do something a little bit more elaborate round the edges. I had even gone to the trouble to search the internet for simple floral quilting designs and thought I'd found something that would work. That was, of course, until I realised that quilting is tricky, especially when you have that much bulk trying to get through the machine. So, in the end I decided not to risk mucking it up and haven't done any quilting around the edge at all. Simplicity has won out in this case, and I actually think the quilt is the better for it. But did you know that you can send your quilt top away to get professionally quilted, and that you can buy special quilting machines with long arms? I learnt that and all sorts of other stuff while trawling the internet for quilting designs. Brilliant!

And, of course You Tube was invaluable when it came to sewing on my binding. I had downloaded printed instructions from Heather Bailey's blog but after having read through them a few times I was still confused so decided to see what videos I could find instead. And voila, I found this one and it was perfect (although I did opt for 2.5" wide strips as per Healther's directions, rather than the 2" ones suggested in the video). Taught me everything I needed to know in less than 10 minutes. If only the hand stitching had been as quick!